February 28, 2008

Dale Carnegie 2.0 - Winning Friends and Influencing People on the Web

No, this is not a picture of Harry S. Truman, but it definitely had me fooled. Nope, this is Dale Carnegie. I've been on this Dale Carnegie kick for the last month or so. And quite honestly it kind of bugs me, because I really didn't enjoy the course when I was "encouraged" to take it after starting my first job out of grad school. For those of you not familiar with DC, he was maybe the first hugely successful self-help/motivational speaker, who wrote the mega-hit How To Win Friends and Influence People back in 1937. So you can blame him for the rise of the "If-You-Can-See-It-You-Can-Be-It" industry, aka motivational speakers. But I digress...

Even though I really wasn't "feeling" the course (partly because I was all of twenty-four years old when I took it), the book made some good points when it comes to how people want to be treated. And by treating them the with a lot of dap ('80s flashback word meaning respect) you improve your chances of making them like you - really really like you. To the point that they'll trust you enough to buy stuff from you.

Although the book was written over 70 years ago, the principles still stand. And if you apply them using today's social media tools they can really work for you. So that's why every time I've been asked lately by traditional small business types who are trying to make sense of the web, I tell them just think what Dale C. would do with blogs, social networks and other things that people are using to reach more people, in a more meaningful way than ever before.

2 Comments

I'm sorry to admit this in public, but I always get Dale Carnegie (writer) confused with Andrew Carnegie (steel mogul rat-bastard). I suppose the latter's approach would be to throw enough money around that everybody remembers you well.

I'd be really interested to see how far you can take the Dale Carnegie approach to social media, either in exploring the concept or by advocating the principles. Clever stuff.

Dale Carnegie actually changed the spelling of his last name to try and be aligned with the Robber Baron. I'll let you know how the DC 2.0 stuff goes, as I'm prepping to do a session on it at the Infusion Software user conference later this week.